Friday, June 28, 2013

Atoning for the Sins of Empire by David M. Anderson

WARWICK, England — THE
British do not torture. At least, that is what we in Britain have always liked
to think. But not anymore. In a historic decision last week, the British
government agreed to compensate 5,228 Kenyans who were tortured and abused
while detained during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s. Each claimant will
receive around £2,670 (about $4,000).

The money is paltry. But
the principle it establishes, and the history it rewrites, are both profound.
This is the first historical claim for compensation that the British government
has accepted. It has never before admitted to committing torture in any part of
its former empire.

In recent years there has
been a clamor for official apologies. In 2010, Britain formally apologized for
its army’s conduct in the infamous “Bloody Sunday” killings in Northern Ireland
in 1972, and earlier this year Prime Minister David Cameron visited Amritsar,
India, the site of a 1919 massacre, and expressed “regret for the loss of
life.”

The Kenyan case has been in
process for a decade in London’s High Court. The British fought to avoid paying
reparations, so the decision to settle is a significant change of direction.
The decision comes months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the British
departure from Kenya— once thought of as the “white man’s country” in East
Africa.

The Kenya case turned on
the evidence of historians, including my own role as an expert witness. I
identified a large tranche of documents that the British government smuggled
out of Kenya in 1963 and brought back to London. The judge ordered the release
of this long-hidden “secret” cache, some 1,500 files.

The evidence of torture
revealed in these documents was devastating. In the detention camps of colonial
Kenya, a tough regime of physical and mental abuse of suspects was implemented
from 1957 onward, as part of a government policy to induce detainees to obey
orders or to make confessions.

The documents showed that
responsibility for torture went right to the top — sanctioned by Kenya’s
governor, Evelyn Baring, and authorized at cabinet level in London by Alan
Lennox-Boyd, then secretary of state for the colonies in Harold Macmillan’s
Conservative government.

When told that torture and
abuse were routine in colonial prisons, Mr. Lennox-Boyd did not order that such
practices be stopped, but instead took steps to place them beyond legal
sanction. “Compelling force” was allowed, but defined so loosely as to permit
virtually any kind of physical abuse.

Why did the British keep
these documents, instead of destroying them? Plenty else was burned, or dumped
at sea, as the British left Kenya.

The answer lay in the
unease of some British colonial officers. Many did not like what they saw. When
the orders to torture came down, some realized the jeopardy they were in. These
men worried that it was they, not their commanders, who would carry the can.

They were right to worry.
Official reports from the 1950s always blamed individual officers — the “bad
apples in the barrel” — for acts of abuse. But the blame lay not with junior
officers forced to implement a bad policy but with the senior echelons of a
colonial government that was rotten to the core.

Kenya’s will not be the
last historical claims case. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office faces others,
some of which have been in progress for years.

A case already before the
courts concerns the 1948 Batang Kali massacre in colonial Malaya, now Malaysia.
There, the relatives of innocent villagers — who were murdered by young
conscript soldiers ordered to shoot by an older, psychopathic sergeant major —
have asked for compensation. For Americans, the case has eerie echoes of
Vietnam.

In Cyprus, translators
employed by the British during the 1950s told tales of electrocutions and
pulled fingernails as British intelligence officers tried to elicit information
about gunrunning.

The case of Aden, now in
Yemen, could be the worst of all. In 1965, the British governor retreated up
the steps of his departing aircraft, firing his revolver at snipers arrayed
around the airport runway. This was not the “orderly retreat from empire” that
many historians would have us believe characterized British decolonization.
Britain’s brutality against its Yemeni enemies in Aden during those final days
has become a local legend.

Though Britain is the first
former European colonial power to pay individual compensation to victims, other
countries have been confronted by similar accusations. In 2006, Germany offered
to pay millions of euros to the Namibian government to compensate for the
German Army’s genocide against the Herero tribe in the early 20th century. It
also issued a public apology in the capital, Windhoek. In 2011, the Dutch
government was ordered by the International Court of Justice to compensate
survivors of a 1947 massacre in colonial Indonesia; it has not yet paid.

Historical research has
played its part in all these cases, but not all historians are happy with the
way things are turning out. Leading historians of British colonialism have long
tended to rejoice in a benevolent, liberal view of imperialism.

The British historians
Andrew Roberts, Niall Ferguson and Max Hastings have all nailed their colors to
the mast of the good ship Britannia as she sailed the ocean blue bringing
civilization and prosperity to the world. This view seems unlikely to be
credible for much longer.

Empire was built by
conquest. It was violent. And decolonization was sometimes a bloody, brutal
business. No American should need reminding of that. And Britain, along with
other imperial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, may yet have to pay for
this.

Torture is torture, whoever
the perpetrator, whoever the victim. Wrongs should be put right. Whatever
wrongs were done in the name of Britain in Kenya in the 1950s, the British
government has now delivered modest reparations to some victims. And maybe we
in Britain have also finally begun to come to terms with our imperial past.

Would the United States be
so accommodating to a similar claim? In the current political climate, probably
not. But times change. Fifty years from now, will Americans face claims from
Guantánamo survivors? You might, and perhaps you should.

David M. Anderson, a
professor of African history at the University of Warwick, is the author of
“Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.
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